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Monday, November 13, 2017

Monday, November 13, 2017 - Lunch Program

One Nation After Trump: The Challenge of Trump and Trumpism to Governance and Society

Norman Ornstein

Donald Trump’s election and his actions so far in office have dramatically changed our political landscape and have brought us to uncharted territory in terms of our society and its governance. Norman Ornstein, a longtime observer and analyst of American politics and the US Congress, will share his perspective on this new political frontier and outline prospects for our country’s future, including ways that we can avoid some of our past mistakes, and offer a framework with which to understand the “new sense of citizenship” that is developing in the US.

Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he studies politics, elections, and the US Congress. He is a co-host of AEI’s Election Watch series, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal and The Atlantic, a BBC News election analyst, and the chairman of the Campaign Legal Center. Ornstein previously served as co-director of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and as senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission.

A longtime observer and analyst of American politics and the US Congress, he has been interviewed on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, and the PBS NewsHour, among others. His articles and opinion pieces have been published widely, including in Politico, The New York Times, NY Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Ornstein’s books include the bestsellers One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported, with E. J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann (St. Martin’s Press, 2017); and It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, and The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, with Thomas E. Mann (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Ornstein has a Ph.D. and a master’s in political science from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Ornstein’s talk is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable.

Monday, November 13, 2017 - Evening Program

Artificial Intelligence, Jane Austen, and the Law

Apoorv Agarwal

Apoorv Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Text IQ, is an expert in artificial intelligence and natural language processing whose doctoral research focused on applying these technologies to the field of literature. He will address the question of whether artificial intelligence can augment our understanding of literature and change the practice of law.

An expert in machine learning and natural language processing, Apoorv Agarwal is dedicated to understanding and improving how humans and machines benefit from working together. His work, which focuses on sentiment analysis, relation extraction, text summarization, and automated Q&A, has received more than 1,000 citations across the international research community.

Agarwal received the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship award in recognition of his work as first author on two separate patents for IBM’s Watson. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, and received the Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Award for Outstanding Performance in Teaching. Agarwal has published more than 30 academic papers in machine learning and natural language processing. In 2014, he was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program, which allowed him to lay the foundation for founding his company, Text IQ.

Beyond academia, Agarwal has been cited by American Banker, WIRED, Popular Science, New Scientist, and Science Magazine, among others. With Text IQ, he aspires to harness and channel the complementary strengths of humans and machines towards solving high-stakes enterprise data problems. Among other novels, his research focused on the work of C.S. Lewis and Jane Austen. He is one of the co-creators of the Ted Talk "Artificial IntelliDance," a performance which explains AI to a non-technical audience through dance.

What is modernity? Where are modernity's points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Professors Ellen Rentz, John Farrell, and Seth Lobis of the CMC Literature Department will join Jason Crawford of Union University and author of "Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics" (Oxford) and Blanford Parker, author of "The Triumph of Augustan Poetics" (Cambridge) for a lively discussion of how early modern English authors envisioned themselves breaking from the medieval.

What is modernity? Where are modernity's points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Professors Ellen Rentz, John Farrell, and Seth Lobis of the CMC Literature Department will join Jason Crawford of Union University and author of "Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics" (Oxford) and Blanford Parker, author of "The Triumph of Augustan Poetics" (Cambridge) for a lively discussion of how early modern English authors envisioned themselves breaking from the medieval.

The discussion is sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.